


A Special Disguise

by Sunderland



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-17 22:19:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16982841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderland/pseuds/Sunderland
Summary: Doctor Stanley gets dressed for Carnivale-- though really, he's been disguised for a long time before that.





	A Special Disguise

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Twelve Days of Carnivale!

Stephan Stanley was a man accustomed to maintaining a level of distance between himself an others. He had to be used to such things-- men in his profession were trusted with a great deal of private information due to the nature of his work. A doctor who could not be trusted to maintain the most sensitive of details regarding a patient’s quirks and ailments would soon find himself with a ruined name and no work save for treating the most unsavory of characters. Over the years he had cultivated for himself a reputation for being intelligent, professional… and distant. Indifferent.

Haughty. Unsympathetic. Cold.

Of course he’d heard all the negative descriptors as well. Stanley didn’t let it bother him. As a young man just entering the profession, he’d been more like the wide-eyed, earnest, well-meaning assistant surgeon assigned to him aboard Erebus than he would have ever admitted. Yes, a younger Stephan Stanley might have even given Goodsir’s bleeding heart a run for its money. Time and experience, however, had granted him a decidedly less naive outlook on life and what it meant to be a doctor. He had seen the good in others, of course, but he had also seen some of the very worst.

It was hard not to take a dim view of one’s fellow man when one had seen what man gleefully did to one another-- murder, rape, poisoning, neglect-- and what man did to himself-- self-harm, drug-seeking, willing ignorance…

Stanley stared down at page before him, the callused pad of his thumb rasping quietly along the edge. He looked and looked, peering down at the sketch of his daughter, his little girl, as if somehow she could help him.

Those sweet eyes gazed back up at him, serene and almost sad somehow, as if only to reaffirm that there was nothing she or her brother or the children’s mother could do to help him. None of them could help him. Not even God could, if He even existed in such a place as this.

This expedition was doomed. It had been from the very start... only no one had realized it until it was far too late. The worst part was, he ruminated in silence, was that some tiny, insignificant little part of him had known for some time. Something subconscious, perhaps. And even as that part of him had come to understand it as the sick bay began to fill and smell of sickness and fear and hopelessness, it hadn’t shared that knowledge with his waking mind.

No, it had taken Goodsir bringing up the matter of the tinned provisions to finally drive home the point. At least the assistant surgeon had brought the matter to his attention before running directly to command with it. The situation was still salvageable. Not correctable, not anymore. Salvageable.

He knew what he would do, and he knew how best to enact his plan. That, too, was almost an instinctive sort of knowledge. He would kill them all. At Carnivale. Before the sun came up. Before anymore of them died of scurvy, or of whatever poison in the tins was killing them. Stanley was a surgeon. He knew what man was capable of and what he was incapable of. They would never survive abandoning the ships; they were simply too far out. They would never make it to the great Back’s Fish River or back to Fury Beach. Manhauling the sledges? Dragging those heavy burdens over ice and rough terrain even as they sickened further? A hundred miles would be too far. Eight hundred some odd miles… they might as well try to walk to the moon. And if scurvy and the poisoned food in the tins didn’t do for them, there was always starvation.

_Or the thing on the ice._ Stanley, for all his stoic demeanor and the level of distance he maintained between himself and his fellows, had doubts that the bear was dead.

No, when he thought about all the horrible ways they could die out here, there was only one thing he could do for the men.

He shook himself from his reverie, from peering into nothingness. Instead he focused on his daughter’s perfect face with its sweet, sad eyes. He could feel his brow furrowing, creasing, the corners of his mouth straining. “It’s a mercy,” he uttered softly, maintaining that matter-of-fact cadence that he had relied on for years-- as if he was informing her of the weather. He’d kept his voice soft for the sake of the sick men dozing here and there in the sick bay, but even so he was almost pleased by how relaxed, how controlled he sounded.

Rising, he closed his journal and scooped it up, tucking it neatly under his arm. He needed to dress for the festivities. It wouldn’t do to rouse suspicion by turning up at Carnivale in his usual uniform and slops. He had to be smart. Calculating. Measured. Precise.

Stanley crossed the narrow sick bay to head back to his narrow cabin. Carefully, almost tenderly depositing his journal on his bunk’s cold pillow, he turned away. To look any longer at the book or the sketch therein was to waver in his resolve. He had to be strong. He had to do this for the good of the men.

_“I don’t believe the others feel as I do, sir,” Collins had said, his voice urgent despite its softness._

_“You do not know how the others feel.”_

That, at least, was truth. Out of everything Stanley had told him that night, at least he hadn’t lied utterly.

The truth… the full truth of it was that he did know what Collins had meant when he’d said his thoughts were ‘flurried.’ It wasn’t how Stanley himself would have described it, but… he’d felt wrong, in a way. His normally precise sense of concentration had seemingly betrayed him. Sometimes his focus just seemed to melt away like the snowflakes the men shook from their slops when they came back belowdecks to warm themselves. Other times, his thoughts seemed to fixate, somehow, as inescapable as the ice that had locked their ships in place. His mind truly was against him.

Still, it never would have done to tell Collins as much. Best to let him think his feelings were utterly normal, nothing to worry over-- so that he wouldn’t cause a panic. The last thing that Stanley wanted was for hysteria to spread due to compromised mental states.

Chancing a look to his reflection in the small mirror that hung on the wall, Stanley felt a sudden chill lance through him as he realized he only barely recognized the face staring back at him. It wasn’t the costume, the heavy ruffles of the neck of it spilling onto his chest…

…It was the face. His face, he knew-- but had his face ever seemed so frozen before, eyes wide and muscles fixed into a rictus manner. His fingers trembled as he lifted a hand to touch at his cheek, feeling the way every muscle in his face felt taut with holding himself together.

_The face of a dead man._

The thought worked through him as he stared into the eyes of the man in the mirror.

He only had to hold on a little longer. He knew what he had to do and the best way to do it.

“A mercy,” he whispered again, and his reflection’s lips moved even as it stared into his very soul.


End file.
